SARATOGA SPRINGS — Boisterously performed and wholly realized in the style of a silent-movie comedy from the 1930s, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” is terrific fun for the 13th season of Saratoga Shakespeare Company.

Brenny Rabine and Yvonne Perry, as mistresses Ford and Page, respectively, deliver ace performances as the eponymous wives, who conspire to humiliate lecherous old Sir John Falstaff (Saratoga Shakespeare’s artistic director, Lary Opitz) and to shame Ford’s husband (Tim Dugan) for his jealousy.

Full of raucous comedy and scenes written with maximum occasion for good-natured humor, “Merry Wives” seems designed as a comedic seat-filler for Shakespeare, and director David Girard wholly embraces the opportunities. Running at a scant 100 minutes, without intermission, the show speeds along, with actors entering from backstage as well as from the sides, sometimes roaming the grass in Congress Park as the story unfolds. Even in Tuesday’s brutal heat the park was almost temperate, the evening shade and mild breeze offering respite from the day’s swelter. (For the audience, at least; the actors, got up in 1930s attire and obligated to rush around, looked rather more warm.)

Girard and his designers (costumes by Brittany Belz, excellent period music by Girard and Byron Nilsson) set the action in 1930s Saratoga. There are references to horse races and area localities, and scenes are divided by the sound of a starting bell and thundering hooves. The period feel is furthered with Three Stooges-style bits, a minor character who’s an homage to Groucho Marx and frantic physical comedy set to music that would accompany melodrama and tomfoolery in a black-and-white movie. When Ford and Page hide Falstaff in a closet before tumbling him into a laundry basket and, later, dressing him as an old woman, Rabine and Perry use a broad, gestural style of acting that’s perfectly suited for the period.

Amy Prothro is even funnier as the thick-accented Mistress Quickly, whose entrepreneurial spirit leads her to participate in many of the shenanigans, and Richard Roe offers the most fun of the show as the cigarette -waving Doctor Caius, whose French accent is even more outrageous than the taunting French knight’s in “Spamalot” at Park Playhouse. (When he says “third,” it comes out as “t’urd.”) As Falstaff, however, Opitz is oddly dull. His take on the character isn’t as a bumbler or buffoon; he seems almost a straight man amid the comedy, a minor fool whose lusty intentions toward the wives occasions comedic behavior from the other characters.

In smaller parts, Mark Cryer brings Souther-preacher zeal to Hugh Evans, Nathaniel Cowper and Ben Forbes are good as two of Falstaff’s minions, and Rigel Harris and Ethan Botwick are appropriately fresh-faced as the story’s young lovers.

Fast-paced, accessible and funny, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” is an excellent evening of Shakespeare in the park.